


ghost eyes and candy apple mouths

by moonix



Series: ghouls just wanna have fun (the blackwood series) [2]
Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - No Exy (All For The Game), Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Andrew doesn't care, Autumn, M/M, Neil is some kind of supernatural being, Slightly weird first date, Small Towns, Spooky, i mean i tried, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-10-06 14:41:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20508695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonix/pseuds/moonix
Summary: In the quaint little town of Blackwood, the only oddity of relevance is the perpetually autumnal weather. Well, and Neil Josten.





	ghost eyes and candy apple mouths

**Author's Note:**

  * For [exybee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/exybee/gifts).

> I made a [moodboard](https://annawrites.tumblr.com/post/187472410699/chapters-11-fandom-all-for-the-game-nora) for this fic before I even wrote the first sentence and asked my friend Bee what she thought it would be about, based on the moodboard. She gave me so many incredible ideas to work with - Southern gothic vibes, a spooky rural small town where it’s autumn all of the time, witchy vibes, Andrew and Neil going on a date to an antiques shop and a graveyard... I didn't even manage to fill all of them. But yeah, half the credit for this fic belongs to her, really!
> 
> (The town is entirely made up - I looked it up and apparently there are several real places called Blackwood, but it just felt like an appropriate name for this one.)
> 
> I also made a [Spotify playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/002BcWGV4qkt53yYBWalQN?si=T-Jq27HxTVGm65FhGeN8iw) that goes with it.

People generally thought there was something odd about Blackwood. People, in general, were wrong.

To Andrew, Blackwood was a boring, back-asswards town, just quiet enough to make dark thoughts bubble and fizz, just wholesome enough to make his fingers twitch for something destructive. It was a town perpetually stuck in a B-rated Halloween movie: somewhere you could imagine a scary serial killer on the loose, but nowhere you’d actually find one.

Nicky thought it was quaint.

Andrew scoffed loudly whenever Nicky talked about the _magic in the air_, because it wasn’t magic; it was something much more mundane, something untamed and rural, like stubborn common weeds dug deep into the earth like fingernails. Andrew and the town had that in common, at least: they’d both latched onto what little ground life had unwillingly ceded to them and held on by the skin of their teeth.

The more obvious oddity about Blackwood was its perpetually autumnal climate and its trees, whose names Andrew had never paid enough attention to memorise, but which were rich shades of wine red and cider gold all year round. Growing like fungus through the forests surrounding Blackwood, they gave off a smell of mulch, wet tea leaves and decay and seemed to be enshrouded in a constant, creeping aura of mist. Mushrooms grew with abandon in the thicket, and every single house and cottage had a sprawling pumpkin patch attached to it somewhere.

Andrew sketched shadowy tendrils of mist reaching out from behind a tree to snatch an unsuspecting black cat. He could swear that for a moment the cat in the picture yawned at him, but it was probably just a trick of the light—he’d stayed up late last night watching ASMR baking videos on Nicky’s laptop and his eyes were painfully dry from leaving his contacts in for so long.

“Nice Dementor.”

Andrew didn’t jump at the voice. He’d sensed him coming, the way he sometimes did when Neil made an effort not to sneak up on him. Sneaking was one of Neil’s hobbies, but he’d realised quickly that Andrew didn’t like it, so he made a point not to do it so much around him.

“Not a Dementor,” Andrew said, but the tendrils of mist behind the tree in Andrew’s drawing had decided to be a Dementor the minute Neil had said it. Andrew sighed and snapped his notebook shut, tapping his pencil against the worn leather cover. “What do you want?”

“Can’t a ghoul just want some pumpkin pie?”

“You don’t like pumpkin pie because, and I quote, it has vegetables in it,” Andrew pointed out. “Did you say ghoul?”

“Of course not,” Neil said, rolling his eyes. “I said guy. What’s that?”

He pointed at Andrew’s half-empty mug. It was a thick ceramic one, hand-painted by the owner of the café, a local woman named Betsy who baked her own pies and sold crockery, jars of honey, knitted socks and fall-themed quilts in the shop next door.

The pies were good, and Andrew had a secret stash of socks in his bottom drawer, because they were exceptionally warm and kept your feet dry even when it rained.

“A Black Heart,” Andrew said.

“Sounds yummy. What’s in it?”

“Chai tea, black treacle, espresso and cocoa.”

Neil scrunched up his nose, then snatched up the mug and took a sip anyway.

“Bitter,” was his verdict before draining the remains. “Hey, so. Go on a date with me?”

Andrew’s eyebrow twitched. He tried to make it look on purpose, but judging by Neil’s concerned look, he didn’t succeed.

“Sorry, I don’t speak eyebrow,” Neil said, licking a smear of whipped cream off the rim of Andrew’s mug. “You’ll have to answer in words. Preferably yes or no.”

“A what,” Andrew said belatedly.

“A date,” Neil repeated. “With me.”

Andrew pulled the sleeves of his sweater down over his hands and felt about five percent more in control. A crow landed nearby with a soft flutter of wings, black eyes polished and shiny like buttons. It cocked its head to the side as if to say, _well?_

“Why?”

Neil shrugged.

“Because I like you,” he said simply. “It’s okay if you don’t like me back.”

The Black Heart was burning dully in the back of Andrew’s throat.

“Do you even know what a date is?” he asked.

“A particular day of the month and year, or the day of a specific event,” Neil deadpanned. “Like, for example, us going out.”

Andrew focused his gaze on the one pesky curl that always stuck out sideways on Neil’s head. It was easier than meeting his eyes, and looking at the curl always made him feel half a gram lighter, somehow.

“And what, exactly, does a date with Neil Josten entail?”

A smile stole across Neil’s face for a moment, fleeting like a will-o-the-wisp. Andrew wanted to follow that mischievous light deep into the heart of the forest and disappear forever.

“Guess you’ll have to find out,” Neil said.

“Guess I will,” Andrew said.

-

Going on a date with Neil Josten, as it turned out, primarily entailed a lot of the things they usually did anyway, including food.

Neil was always hungry, so Andrew wasn’t surprised when their first stop was his uncle’s bakery. Stuart gave them a stack of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cut in the shape of ghosts, which they ate walking down the main street where most of Blackwood’s shops were huddled together like scared children. Once the sandwiches were gone, Neil led the way into an antiques shop and promptly managed to disappear the moment Andrew’s head was turned. Andrew sneezed—the shop was dustier than a crypt, and something tickled at the back of his mouth like pollen. He decided to entertain himself by picking up the fiddly-looking music boxes, porcelain figurines and creepy dolls from the nearest shelf and moving them all just a tad bit to the left, out of alignment with their dust rings.

“Careful,” Neil whispered behind him, and Andrew dropped a glass cat, toppling it onto its side. When he turned to glare, Neil was already gone again, though the dust swirling through the air still seemed to shine a little brighter where he’d stood.

When they stepped out of the shop twenty minutes later, the sky had aged several hours, heavy with cataract clouds. Neil was hungry again and pulled Andrew over to one of the market stalls, carefully pinching Andrew’s sleeve between his fingers. Andrew tried to peel them off but somehow only succeeded in winding their hands together in a complicated cable-knit pattern.

“Candy apple or apple cheese pie?” Neil asked.

“Why not both,” Andrew shrugged. A weird sensation was travelling up his arm from their linked hands, like reaching into a patch of very gentle thistles. He couldn’t tell if Neil’s hand was very cold or very hot, just that it was very.

Neil ate most of the pie and Andrew ate most of the candy off the apple and then they switched. When they were done they ended up at the old church, the one that hadn’t been in use in decades, and Neil led them on a meandering path through the overgrown graveyard, startling a couple of dozing cats and a whole murder of crows.

“That’s always struck me as a very impractical expression,” Neil mused. “What if some crows actually got murdered? Everyone would just assume people were talking about a flock of crows.”

“If it was several crows getting murdered, you could just say a serial murder of crows,” Andrew suggested. Most of his left arm felt numb by now, but Neil seemed happy to continue holding his hand, so he kept quiet.

“What if they all got murdered by different people, though? Then you’d be in a right pickle.”

They entered the church through a side entrance, skirting the rubble and the abandoned beer bottles and cigarette butts. The broken stained glass windows distorted the light in shades of dawn and dusk. For a moment, it was like being underwater.

“Speaking of pickles,” Neil said, his voice echoing strangely like a drunk bat skittering off the walls. “I could do with a sandwich.”

“Are you aware that pickles are technically vegetables?” Andrew asked. His own voice sounded surprisingly normal, despite the wide-open space.

“Semantics,” Neil scoffed.

“Taxonomy, actually.”

“My point exactly,” Neil grinned, and for a second his teeth looked inhumanly sharp.

Andrew still wanted to kiss him.

“I want to kiss you,” he said.

“Alright,” Neil said. “But only if we’re getting sandwiches after.”

They went outside. Andrew let Neil pull him again, though he still couldn’t feel his arm. They wandered around the outskirts of the forest, dipping in and out of the underbrush until Andrew’s head was swimming with the sudden back-and-forth changes in ambient noise. The trees blanketed everything like velvet, muffling the sky and shifting the birdsong a few millimetres to the left of its familiar dust ring. Finally, they stopped in front of a gnarled old oak and Neil laid his hand over a gouge mark in the bark like a greeting. Something not unlike a breeze caught Andrew by surprise and made him shiver, though the air remained perfectly still.

Neil turned back to him and smiled.

“Still want to kiss me?”

Andrew looked at the beckoning fool’s glow of that smile and stepped into the woods.

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos/comments appreciated. :)
> 
> I'm on [Tumblr](https://annawrites.tumblr.com/) as annawrites.


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